Re: Insteon Observations

[nobody@xxxxxxxxxxxx (Dave Houston)]

"Dennis Brothers" <brothers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Been busy on other projects.  Also had a classic worst-case disaster a while
>back - simultaneous hard-drive failures in my laptop and primary desktop
>computers, and since they were backing each other up...  Lost a bunch of
>email; managed to recover most of the other critical stuff.  Needless to
>say, my backup strategy is a little different now :)

I recently lost an old laptop. It never recovered from a defrag.
Fortunately, I could boot DOS and see the HDD so was able to salvage the
files.

I have a network HDD that I try to use for backing up the things I really
don't want to lose but the actual backing up is hit or miss. But the most
critical stuff is distributed among 3 machines.

>Anyway, about Insteon:
>
>My house was built in the early fifties.  And the sixties.  And the
>seventies.  And the eighties.  The house is now about 4000 square feet,
>about 90 feet end-to-end, and has an "interesting" mix of wiring styles.  My
>HA computer is at one end of the house, a long distance from most of the
>stuff it controls.  X-10 was always marginal, even with an array of phase
>couplers, boosters, filters, all the usual stuff.  I've been completely
>Insteon for about a year now, and power-line control has been absolutely
>reliable.  I was using my own HomeSeer plug-in until the disk problems; when
>I rebuilt the system I installed the "official" HomeSeer Insteon plugin.
>
>My biggest reservation about Insteon right now is the physical reliability
>of the devices.  Out of thirty or so SwitchLincs, I've got two SwitchLinc
>Relays with bad rocker contacts - one won't turn on; the other won't turn
>off.  Both work fine under power line control.  Even more alarming is that
>I've had three or four LampLincs die when bulbs they were controlling burned
>out.

Could it be the Lamplincs went bad and took the bulbs out? I think that's
more likely. Someone else reported 2 similar incidents on the Insteon forum
and I suggested he make sure the latest failed module gets to SH engineering
and they've taken steps to do that.

Your experience is sorta what I expected when I first looked at Insteon and
reviewed it here. The basic technology looks good - Smarthome still looks
like Smarthome. :(

I'm glad I only paid $100 for the SDK. ;)

>All of my Insteon stuff is early production; I'm about to get all the failed
>devices replaced under warranty - I'll see if anything's improved,
>quality-wise.
>
>    - Dennis Brothers


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